Failure™ Magazine

Moodunnit?

Putting Sacred Cows out to pasture.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Business

Who do you see as the audience?
The book is aimed at middle and senior management—employees who manage other employees. It’s not for people just starting out in business because it’s difficult to figure out what rules you should break before you know what the rules are.

Were any of your ideas inspired by frustration over how your clients have behaved?
Oh, sure [laughs]. So much of learning comes from frustration. These days we have clients who believe in our point of view. The people that inspired some of our thoughts were clients we’ve had at other agencies.

Is there a Sacred Cow that is commonly invoked in the advertising world?
Always trust your research. In the advertising business research is often used to provide insight, but it can be a crutch or tell you what not to do. There’s this great quote from Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘A faster horse.‘”

The truth is that if you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before it’s often met with skepticism. A lot of times when we test ad campaigns the focus groups will be looking to point out all the shortcomings. That tends to homogenize the work we do.

Can you provide an example of a company that failed because it blindly believed in a Sacred Cow?
In 1999, the Beihua Beverage Company, doing business in a country with a billion tea drinkers [China] had the bright idea of introducing iced tea. So the company went to the head of its research department [Liu Qiang] and asked him to test the idea. Sixty-plus percent of the people said they didn’t like the iced tea.

A year later Beihua’s chief competitor [Xu Ri Sheng] introduces iced tea and it sells like crazy. So Beihua goes back to its research director and asks, “What happened?” Qiang revisits the research and realizes that the taste tests had been conducted in the middle of winter. Of course, people weren’t keen on drinking iced tea when it was cold outside.

What this example teaches me is sometimes you ask the wrong questions at the wrong time. But in the larger picture it tells me that you should follow your instincts, even if research tells you not to.

One of your Sacred Cows is “Success breeds success.” Does failure breed failure?
[Laughs]. Not always. Failure breeds failure until it becomes success. In other words, if failure teaches you something and you are able to use that to experiment again then it may not breed ultimate failure.

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